Economics says that the price of a card should eventually reach roughly (price of game) divided (number of cards).

Then again, economics also says that I should be earning a decent chunk of cash a month based on my education level, but in reality I'm sitting here in just pants and eating melted cheese and pretzels.

That's making two assumptions
1) The Steam market is perfectly competitive. This might be true but I doubt it's perfectly competitive.
2) The average cost of a card is the same as (price of game)/(number of card drops). I think this is the key flaw. You're assuming the game itself has no value.

I don't see how the steam market could be anything but perfectly competitive - anyone can buy the games, all data relating to market prices are easily accessible and anyone can sell the cards.

I'll concede the second point - I've assumed that the games wouldn't be purchased in the future for any other reason than to get cards (ie: a user creates a new account for the sole reason of buying a game he already owns to get the card drops).
I do think this assumption holds to some extent for the more unpopular games provided they don't go on sale.

The reason I think the prices will go up is simply because the cards are used up far quicker than they are dropped.

I think the Steam market is probably close to perfectly competitive but since trades happen outside the market through trades and bots some of that perfect knowledge is lost.

I also think that card prices will rise over time for the same reason that you do. It's also worth noting that the current cards are marked as "Series 1" implying that they may be discontinued and new series may be created. This could obviously increase their price more. At that point the price of the card would probably have nothing to do with the game and could in theory be worth more than the game itself.

Increase, since a player can only get 50% of the cards there aren't enough cards on the total of the people to get full card sets so they will probably increase and give the current state a week or two since the newbies joined when the beta ended and give hella-cheap prices, give it time.

Doesn't work that way. Booster packs don't drop at a set rate. The drops are controlled depending on the saturation of the market. If there are too few of a particular set on the market then booster drops increase. If there are too many of a set on the market then booster drops will decrease or even stop altogether. Item farms will not increase the overall supply in the long run.

A) How do you know it's the case and not simply random like TF2 hat drops? Also, if it really stops dropping when there are too many sets on the market, prices will fall too like I said in my first post. B) My point was, 'idlefarm' accounts exist to generate stuff for sale. While normal player might use booster or fail to do anything with it, these will end up on the market somehow increasing total supply.

A. Because Valve employees have stated on the forums that booster drop rates were controlled based on the market. B. He who controls the supply controls the price. If the price drops below a certain point supply is cut off until the price increases. No amount of idle accounts will make a damned bit of difference once that happens.

Except for a few exceptions, most card set prices have stayed fairly stable since the beta ended. A few have even gone up. There will probably be a slight dip during and just after the summer sale but then it will even out again.

Trading cards will never be more expensive than the cost of the game divided by the number of card drops the game has. Because if you pay more than that for a card, you are a complete moron. Because you can just buy the game again on a different account and get more cards. This does not apply to foil cards of course.

For everyone saying that the price of cards will NEVER go above the price of the game divided by drops, you're not taking reality into account at all. The major thing here is that you can get duplicates if you just make a new account and rebuy the game, and the reason people buy cards is to craft badges, which need one of each unique card.

Granted, cards still won't go that high for a number of reasons, but people really need to stop breaking out their fake economics degrees here.

Not true. You're forgetting about the 15 percent transaction fee, and the fact that cards from the same game can have different values. Strike Suit Infinity, for example, has cards ranging from 85 cents to 1.12 dollars at the time of this writing.

Yes, but what if you get two of the cheaper ones? The whole point here is that you bought the game again because the cards went over the 'ideal' price, but people are forgetting about hundreds of other factors, such as convenience. I know for a fact that if cards went over their 'max' price, I'd just buy the cards instead of rebuying the game thanks to the sheer convenience, security, and effort saving.

I'm arguing that the 'max' price being the price of the game divided by drops is an incredibly poorly thought out concept that doesn't make sense when you take the real world into account.

If by rebuying the game you'd save only a couple of cents it wouldn't be worth the hassle. But I'm pretty sure many people would go for it if the savings were, say, 30-50cents. BTW some of them would not only do that for that little gain, but also for a good cause of supporting developers.

I guarantee you that enough people will think it's enough of a gamble that they'll buy the cards on the market for over the value. Even if it goes a buck or two for the full collection over, I would gladly pay the difference to save the hassle of making a new account, activating it, idling there, and hoping that I don't get duplicates. Of course, they won't go that high for a number of other reasons that I don't care to get into, but the 'max' price thing is a pretty fundamentally flawed argument when you try and apply it to the real world.

Again, time and effort, not to mention the fact that the vast majority don't offer 1:1 trades. If not using a bot, you first have to find someone who wants your card, and then you have to hope that they want your card, too. If you're using a bot, you have to find one that has the prices and stock you want, and they usually have hour-ish queue times. Again, I'd gladly pay a buck or two on the market to avoid all that hassle.